Final Post & Final Dress | Cha Tori

After almost 3 months at Sumie Tachibana, it is time to wrap up, put the scissors away, and head back to school. For the past 3 weeks, I have been working on my final project, an "armor inspired" evening dress. The process of design and construction was long but Sumie was a great mentor. I believe the dress is a testament to her guidance and the creativity and ambitious designs that she pushes her interns to achieve.

In conceptualizing the gown, I was most influenced by samurai armor. The mixture of textures, textiles, and colors from samurai armor has always fascinated me.

After about 20 different sketch designs for the dress Sumie and I finally settled on this one:

We felt that it fit pretty well with the other pieces in the collection and that it had a great balance of soft and hard.

There were a few different challenging components of the dress. Foremost among them was the enormous ruffle that went around the bottom. This drew inspiration from victorian ruffles and so I began researching how they historically were made. It is a very labour intensive process involving a lot of hand stitching and even more fabric. I ended up using a simplified method which both greatly reduced the amount of work I had to do and the amount of fabric required.

Nonetheless it required quite a bit of fabric, 45 feet to be specific! Here is how it looked finished:

The next challenge was making sure that the fabric would be strong enough to maintain its ruffle since it was 10 inches tall and 8 inches deep. Fortunately, we were able to find a fabric which had a very stiff cross grain and due to that and the method of attaching it to the foundation skirt I did not have to use boning, horse hair, etc.

This is the final product and I am enormously proud of it.

There was a lot of frustration working with so much fabric and many long days spent working on it, but I think it is a beautiful gown which I am proud to have included in the Sumie Tachibana Fall 2012 collection: Test Batch No. 2.

Thank you Sumie for being a wonderful mentor and pushing my creativity!